Somewhere a Clock Is Ticking
by Valieara
Summary: [Spoilers for Dominion] A little girl with light eyes nods an understanding she doesn’t know, smiles a pretty smile tinged with mischief. Her hair, dark and unruly. Her mother falls. It had never been enough.


**Disclaimer**: I own nothing. Title credit goes to Snow Patrol's song by the same name.

**Spoilers:** Everything's fair game through _Dominion._

**Notes:** Is a little (very) vague at times. For the confused (and I don't blame you one bit), the timeline goes from _Flesh and Blood_ to _Counterstrike_ to _The Quest part II_ to _Dominion. _And you'll definitely need to have watched _Crusade. _Feedback is greatly loved and appreciated. :-)

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Ruffles and pinafores and rustling skirts about her were the first thing she was conscious of to the point of being able to remember it. Stubby, curious fingers fingered light brown curls that poked persistently from underneath a tiny bonnet fitted over wild locks. A roomful of women waited for her to roll over, to walk, to speak. And so she did, but not at their bidding. 

"Where is my mother?"

The words fell clumsily, unused, out of her mouth, getting in the way of her tongue and lips and teeth. The women shared worried glances, while alone in another room, another woman unlike all of them waited agitatedly in another room to hold her child, her labor pains just two hours past.

She blinked expectantly at carefully blank faces. An equal blankness persisted against her light eyes, refusing an overlay of the contrast of woman over women, of mother over maids, of the unknown over the known.

One of the women took her pudgy hand and smiled down at her as if she were her own child.

"I will take you to your mother, Orici."

"Hallowed are the Ori," she said solemnly, with greater care and precision than she had before, tongue and lips and teeth becoming advantage over annoyance.

Mother. It was an indefinable word for the outpouring of confusion and perplexity she felt at hearing and speaking it. Blue-grey eyes met hers, sharply – or did it only seem so because of their contrast with her raven hair, with the darkness of the room itself? She laid a hand on the woman's abdomen to heal her, and felt the fear nearly radiating from her. Her offsetting smile seemed to be nearly a baring of teeth.

Looking up at her mother, she gave a small nod and mysterious smile. It was a moment of understanding full of everything known and unknown; an uncertainty of the future and of themselves. In a locked gaze of bright and light, something like shock met a strange naïveté.

And the back of her small stumbling mind, she registered vaguely that this woman's wariness should have been reciprocated. It was a yet-to-be realized counterstrike, weariness taking the place of wariness in the first fleeting flash of a shadow over her bright eyes; highlighted by some future brilliant power and unknown dark eyes.

It thrilled her; it terrified her.

She smiled slightly, strangely, for one of the first and last fleeting moments when flashes born of uncertainty were enough to revel in, to hold onto and adore.

Unnerved, her mother continued to stare, her hands stilled at her sides, wanting to reach and brush away her daughter's undecided and wayward locks from her forehead. It was enough.

"It is alright, I will show you the path," she said softly, calmly, swaying and shifting unintentionally from side to side, foot to foot. Mother's eyes narrowed in something like awe or horror; the woman's eyes behind her crinkled in a smile.

"Hallowed are the Ori."

Irrationally, her own eyes twitched; her fingers itched; her lips took on a pretty, faraway smile. Such beautiful hair; long and dark and smooth. She wanted to reach out and touch it.

But a hand reached out to take hers and lead her from the room as she thought her mother would have reached out for her. She looked back once, and never did so again.

oOo

Dissipation, diffusion, disintegration – a heap of rubble, a void; it is all the same.

Destruction. Conversion.

Relentlessly, Adria turns away from it.

Was this the way it had happened, then? Her mother had lain on the floor nearer to death than anyone realized, a beautiful and gruesome painting of pain with her tousled raven hair, her rich blue dress, her twisted face, Adria herself unable to heal her before the shock of an energy weapon's discharge being used against her for the first and only time – and then darkness. Unknowledge. There were far too many unanswered questions.

Vigilance is key to everything.

Her mother's arms around her today for the first time in her life had dispelled this idea, not with the fact of the embrace, because two loose arms unsure about her shoulders hadn't seemed to constitute an embrace even as such she'd had from her maids and nurses when she was still small enough for her eyes not to frighten them so much, for their hands to automatically stray to tame her unruly hair, to hold her hands and try to prompt a distant, eerie smile that was a smile nonetheless. Within a day these were all things of the past, her figure defined and imposing, her eyes harsh and odd, her face showing a child's betrayal on an adult's face. They bowed to her still in the same aloof, fearful manner that her mother had then come close, a treacherous whisper of a doubt in her mind.

Adria had known no more. Her dark eyes opened to blue, and she drew back from a fall of hair as dark as her own, smiling incongruously. Her mother indulged her with one of her own.

"Well, darling, here we are in a dark, gloomy room. You've got us. What now?"

She'd held on to that _darling_ like a coarse, ironic caress.

She had known her mother did not believe from the moment she'd first walked into that cold room as a tiny child clinging to another woman's hand, Mother at the center, shock and betrayal washing over her mind in time with the last vestiges of labor pains. It was a disbelief born from never having known the truth, and something that lurked in the shadows of her mind. A flash of fire, a jerk awake, or to the present.

It had been a bargain, her mother's choice: an easy way out of a place and mentality she had loathed. Even as her mother stole away from chaos and certain anarchy, the effects stayed with her daughter as long as her never-seen smirk, always hidden so secretly in her smile.

Dark-haired and willowy, she'd later thought her mother smirked back at her in her reflection.

_You and I are more alike than you like to think._

Adria. Dark.

She'd slowly fingered her black curls now grown into smoothness and tameness. She didn't think it was what her mother had meant.

Her mother's relief at seeing her alive had been part of a myriad of emotions, none of which Adria wanted to look at too closely. Jumbled and mixed and intertwined, they were all nevertheless so strong as to assault her where she stood tall and regal and proud opposite her across a room filled with bodies.

The same unbeliever that had nearly cost her mother her life all those months ago had stood protectively next to her, then, something near abhorrence written in his eyes, but not his face. Some room for judgment remained against his will – a character flaw; or misguided loyalty to a friend?

Adria had disliked him instantly. A heretic. A hindrance. A former ascended.

She was, against her will, intrigued.

A brief flash of light, unpredicted and provocative. Assimilation. Conversion. An unrealized counterstrike slips tantalizingly between her still-clumsy fingers, just outside her grasp but still within reach.

Assimilation. Conversion. She cannot turn away.

oOo

"Orici."

Her head aches as it hasn't since the vastness of what lay in her mind first opened itself to her: the forced assimilation of a terrifying amount of knowledge; the unmerited sense of urgency; the pain she had borne for those who believed.

The Priors are watching her, but they do not call again. She moves on.

Her body aches as she cannot remember, sore from stumbling along in an old man's body, following close behind her mother, unnoticed, unknown, observing. There is a love of freedom and life in her mother that she nearly forced herself to emanate. It was that love, she supposed, that was embodied in every bounce, twirl, flaunt, and grin. It was another side of her mother that was happy, or at least unrestrained, and dared anyone to challenge it. Adria had never noticed it.

As a kindly old man, she had been able to do no more than steal sideways glances of her mother's dark haired pigtails and bright eyes. She seemed like a child.

The thought was enough to make her burn with resentment.

The remains of a smile-smirk had been on her face from something Colonel Mitchell had just said to her, her head tilted to the side, her sharp blue-grey gaze trained now, inexplicably, on her.

Adria's heart beat once, loudly. Her mother blinked, and narrowed her eyes in something like confusion or recognition.

But no, she was talking with Dr. Jackson, and Adria thought she must have imagined it, drained, fatigued. Perhaps it had shown. Perhaps it was the reason Dr. Jackson's suspicion had spread among his teammates, even as he shortened his pace to walk with her, unknowing, wearing.

The moment of realization had brought a small thrill, a great relief. Colonel Mitchell had known with one glance to her to her mother and back, firing his weapon without hesitation. The others were more hesitant, their weapons raised but not used. Colonel Carter chanced a quick glance at her mother, along with Dr. Jackson. Teal'c's gaze remained straightforward.

In the rapid staccato flashes of gunfire had come quick flashes of an all-consuming stream of fire, of terror, of death. Her own dark eyes broke from Colonel Mitchell's hard ones and flashed to her mother's. Her gun was lowered; her breathing strained; her present and anachronistic fears and screams echoing in the unheard space between them, even as new washes of resignation and realization washed them gradually away.

In the eerie silence, her mother's face had become slightly apprehensive before it closed; and her own dark head tilted, thoughtful.

There was a premeditated fear of the fire that carried and endured, manifesting itself in ways symbolic and real. More altars through which the fire twisted and turned, mocking her; another on which there was mercifully no burning, but starvation, depravation, and humiliation. Weakness. The onset of unreality; visions and dreams that may or may not have had anything to do with reality itself.

The fire was inescapable.

One hand clutched protectively over her swollen belly, her eyes to the canopy above her. It rippled with heat and the intangible. Another hand joined her first; a face of fire dipped perilously closer to her own. Action, reaction; it was impossible to say whose movement was which.

Her baby kicked. A gruesome grin appeared above her.

Her mother had choked, involuntarily, in dreams and in waking.

It had taken perhaps the space of a second.

Adria's eyes flicked away from her mother's blue ones, dark with emotion Adria did not venture to understand. It was enough. Her lips had involuntarily smirked, slightly.

She had not watched her retreat to the gate, those eyes boring a hole in her even so; her eyes trained instead on another pair of blue eyes, lowering themselves unwillingly as their brightness dimmed.

Her mother's eyes flash in front of her, luminous, illusory.

"Orici - "

_Adria_

"Enough," she says, waving her hand and not looking behind her. "I must retire for the day."

Sharp, her mother's eyes follow her in another dark room in an anachronistic reality. A hand on a womb grows and spreads and holds itself in the air, holding no more or less power in its palm than it ever had.

_I will show you the path._

Her own eyes flicker, belatedly, in something like indecision or affection. Her mother's harden in confusion. It was the zenith of a reversal, or not. Bright steel eyes lock on hesitant ones that for once, do not glow. Power manifests itself in a hand that begins to rise and uncurl, and be once again clasped protectively toward her chest.

Somewhere a little child smiles, unnaturally, wreathed in her untamable and uncovered curls.

_I'm sorry it has to be this way._

With that realization, with a push, with another's self-sacrifice, her mother's face collapsed.

Her eyes had burned through it all.

oOo

It is almost enough to relax into; the compassion, the aching tenderness, the hesitant brush of her mother's fingers against her forehead. Hair dark as her mother's is swept to the side; eyes much darker remain closed in exhaustion and a contentment just as aching.

There is nothing but truth in the emotions that run fluidly down her mother's fingers, soothing her to the core of her soul in a bittersweet lull. Full of divisions that had at some unnoticed point bled out and run together, they blend now, hate and despair into an unwitting caring, an involuntary and unwanted recognition that her daughter belongs to her, and to no one.

Unconscious, she does not struggle from her state.

Her mother's fingers linger, naquadah sensing naquadah, host to host, pawn to pawn. It is a moment of rare understanding, and of loss.

_What about Adria?_ A thousand times a tacit and unheard question, once voiced aloud, now ringing in the silence between them with something like guilt and regret and relief.

It is enough. Her mother's fingers toy, deliberately, with her hair once more, and leave her altogether.

_I am not your mother._

It should have been enough.

Adria never thought it would come to the point of threats, and desperation, and death. She holds her mother for the second time, and the last time, a grip intangible but real constricting her mother's throat. A weapon symbolic of all they never were lays on the ground.

_I am not your daughter._

She pays no attention to her pleading bright eyes, closing her own in response. Blue to black. Darkness destroys everything.

It had never been enough. Light to light, and light to dark; it is her brightness that now eclipses even that of her mother's eyes, worried and fearful over a _Goodbye, mother_ which had both taken everything back, and reinforced it.

_I am; I am not._

A little girl with light eyes nods an understanding she doesn't know; smiles a pretty smile tinged with mischief. Her hair, dark and unruly. Her mother falls.

It had never been enough.


End file.
